Saturday, November 17, 2007

Carnegie Museum's New Dino Hall



From KDKA:

The Carnegie Museum's long awaited "Dinosaurs In Their Time" is opening Nov. 21, 2007.

About $36 million dollars in renovations have created a 3-story atrium setting and adjoining halls for "Dinosaurs In Their Time." .

Most of the free-standing dinosaurs are original fossilized bones. Apatosaurus whips her tail at a charging raptor-like Allosarus. Even more startling - these very creatures may have had a run-in back in the day.

"These dinosaurs would have actually lived together - these two here Allosarus and Apatosaurus actually come from the same hole in the ground," Assistant Curator Matt Lamanna said.

It was in 1898 that Andrew Carnegie launched his museum's first dinosaur hunt. They bagged the Diplodocus in Wyoming at 89 feet from tip to tail. "Dippy" is still the longest complete dinosaur specimen in captivity. In phase one of the exhibit, "Dippy" and others from the Triassic and Jurassic periods as well as the "Cretaceous Seaway" have been cleaned and re-mounted.

Restorers have also turned previously 2-dimensional dinosaurs like the duck-billed Corythosaurus into 3-dimensional exhibits, painstakingly freeing them from the rock they were buried in.

Watch the trailer for the new show: